Read article 'On the trail of the HL-LHC magnets'
Inside the IB3 Tech Building at Fermilab on the outskirts of Chicago, a heavy-duty machine several metres long slowly winds a flat superconducting cable. Watching the bespoke coil winder – called th...
Read article 'Going underground'
The High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) project at CERN is a major upgrade that will extend the LHC’s discovery potential significantly. Approved in June 2014 and due to enter operation in the mid-2020s, t...
Read article 'AWAKE makes waves'
In early December, the AWAKE collaboration made an important step towards a pioneering accelerator technology that would reduce the size and cost of particle accelerators. Having commissioned the faci...
Read article 'Proton–lead run tops record year of LHC operations'
On 26 October, the LHC completed its 2016 proton–proton operations at a collision energy of 13 TeV, during which it exceeded the design value of the luminosity and broke many other records (CERN C...
Read article 'Electron gun shrunk to matchbox size'
A team of researchers from DESY and MIT has built a new kind of electron gun that is about the size of a matchbox.
Read article 'ALICE prepares for high-luminosity LHC'
The LHC is preparing for a major high-luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC) with the objective to increase the instantaneous luminosity to around 2 × 1035 cm–2 s–1 for proton–proton (pp) collisio...
Read article 'A record year for the LHC'
LHC proton running for 2016 reached a conclusion on 26 October, after seven months of colliding protons at an energy of 13 TeV. The tally for the year is truly impressive. I could mention the fact t...
Read article 'All systems go for the High-Luminosity LHC'
On 19 September, the European Investment Bank (EIB) signed a 250 million Swiss francs (€230 million) credit facility with CERN in order to finance the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-L...
Read article 'First physics at HIE-ISOLDE begins'
In early September, the first physics experiment using radioactive beams from the newly upgraded ISOLDE facility got under way: a study of tin, which is a special element because it has two double mag...
Read article 'Large beams take LHC physics forward'
Usually, the motto of the LHC operations team is “maximum luminosity”. For a few days per year, however, this motto is put aside to run the machine at very low luminosity. The aim is to pr...
